Another player has entered the thriving market of semiconductor chips with built-in modems, people. A newly formed joint venture, which includes Fujitsu, NTT DOCOMO, NEC, and Fujitsu Semiconductor, called Access Network Technology Limited aims at capturing a piece of the lucrative pie.

Fujitsu will own 52.8% of the newly minted company, with NTT Docomo, NEC and Fujitsu Semiconductor owning 19.9, 17.8, and 9.5% respectively. Read more »

It looks like Samsung is about to answer all critics of the PenTile natured displays of the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy S III in an adequate fashion. The Korean giant has reportedly squeezed out the jaw dropping 350ppi out of an AMOLED display with RGB stripe.

The feat has been accomplished in laboratory test, via the application of fine metal mask technology, which is a departure of the, currently used by Samsung, laser-induced thermal imaging method. Read more »

We already knew a quad-core version of the excellent Snapdragon S4 processor was in the works and now Qualcomm has officially unveiled it. But it hasn’t just announced the chip, and is also offering you a chance to use it on their new Mobile Development Platform (MDP), which for the first time is available in a tablet form-factor and will be sold through BSQUARE.

The MDP/T is primarily targeted at developers and hardware manufacturers who would want to try the new chipset and test their apps on it. The device runs on Android 4.0 but the software is not final, as is often the case with these developer devices. Read more »

Sony has hyped the Xperia go as a rugged smartphone ever since its recent release, and it now yet another group of sadistic testers have decided to see just how resilient it really is.

The guys from German tech site A1 have taken it upon themselves to put the Xperia Go through a gauntlet of various tests to push the limits of its IP67 certification, including dunking it in a pool, running it over with a car, and making it into an ice cream sandwich. Get it, Ice Cream Sandwich? Read more »

Today HTC and Beats have taken another step apart in their partnership, as Beats have purchased back some of the shares they sold to HTC last year.

Beats execs once again have a controlling interest in their own company, as HTC have agreed to sell them back half of the shares purchased in last years acquisition. Beats now have 75% of the shares, while the remaining roughly 25% still belong to HTC. Read more »

By using a custom Kernel module, some XDA developers members have managed to overclock the Krait CPU cores of the HTC One X (the one available on the AT&T and Rogers networks) to 1.8 GHz.

This makes the MSM8960 SoC about 20% faster and the Kernel is applicable to any rooted One X, based on Krait, without the need to unlock the bootloader. Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy S III uses Wolfson Microelectronics’ WM1811 Audio Hub – the chip device that converts digital sound into analog, bringing users crystal clear HD sound during calls and during audio playback. This information was confirmed by Wolfson itself on the company’s website.

For those unfamiliar with Wolfson and Samsung’s partnership the Wave and Galaxy S both used the WM8994 Audio Hub and have been regarded as stellar performers. Read more »

If you’re ever lost in the wilderness and your cellphone is busted or has no signal, you’re not as totally screwed as you may think.

It turns out that you can make yourself a handful of nifty survival tools if you crack open your cellphone. And these just may save your life Read more »

ARM is best known for designing mobile CPUs, but they make GPUs as well – their Mali-400 GPU has powered many popular high-end smartphones, but next year we’ll be seeing its successor inside low and mid-range phones.

The new Mali-450 GPU has received some performance tweaks but changes to the architecture also allow more cores to be used. Read more »

Here is a bummer. The flagship Galaxy S III has a redesigned MHL port and that’s incompatible with the previous HDMI MHL adapters available for other Samsung products.

The reason is very simple – despite the USB MHL port looks the same, the phone uses the connector pins in a different way. Thus your old MHL HDMI cables won’t work on the newly released S III. Read more »

A new type of capacitive display allows any type of button to protrude from a touchscreen on command. When no longer needed, the buttons drop back down seamlessly into the screen.

Combining the best aspects of a touchscreen interface with physical keys, this Tactile Layer technology from Tactus could drive the final nail in the hardware QWERTY keyboard’s coffin. Read more »

Mobile chipsets’ processing power is improving unbelievably fast over the past few years, but unfortunately, this brings a lot of unwanted heat to the equation, which takes away some of the fun. According to Qualcomm, though, this needn’t be the case.

This is where their Snapdragon S4 SoC comes in, prepared to show how much cooler (literally!) it is than the TI OMAP 4430 (Motorola RAZR, competitor A) and the Exynos 4210 (Samsung Galaxy S II, competitor B) in a thermal shootout. Read more »

Asus just made quite a few announcements at the eve of Computex – the TAICHI dual-screen notebook series, the Transformer Book lineup with detachable screens, two Transformer-like tablets, and the all-in-one PC Transformer AiO.

All new devices run on Windows 8, and the Transformer AiO does Android as well. Read more »

Well, it was only going to be a matter of time before the inquisitive minds at iFixit or Chipworks got their hands on the new Galaxy S III and skillfully take it apart bit by bit and so finally they have.

This has lead to some rather interesting discoveries as mentioned below. Read more »

LG has created a new display for the ever evolving smartphone that involves packing in 1920 x 1080 pixels in just 5-inches of display space. This is the world’s first FullHD smartphone display and has a pixel density of an astonishing 440ppi, way ahead of what we currently have in our phones.

The panel used in the display is an Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching or AH-IPS LCD. This is the same technology that LG used in one of its panels last year for which they also won an award. Compared to standard IPS panels, AH-IPS panels have greater color accuracy, wider viewing angles and greater light transmission which leads to lower power consumption. Read more »